Society online - Philip N. Howard

These editors have the respect, visibility, and track-record to make this volume a contribution to the field of Internet studies. It will be adopted as an upper-division text and can also serve as a valuable reference work for doctoral students. Given its broad mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, this work should have wide appeal across the Social Sciences and Information Studies.-- Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California Within the developed world, much of society experiences political, economic, and cultural life through a set of communication technologies barely older than many citizens. Society Online: The Internet in Context examines how new media technologies have not simply diffused across society, but how they have rapidly and deeply become embedded in our organizations and institutions. Society Online is not exclusively devoted to a particular technology, or specifically the Internet, but to a range of technologies and technological possibilities labeled new media. Rather than trying to cover every possible topic relating to new communication technologies, this unique text is organized by how these new technologies mediate the community, political, economic, personal, and global spheres of our social lives. Editors Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones explore the multiple research methods that are required to understand the embeddedness of new media. Society Online discusses the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and is the first book to bring together leading social scientists to provide the most comprehensive and far-reaching Internet research data sets and to contextualize Internet use in modern life. The book features contributions by leading scholars from across the social sciences using a range of research techniques including systematic content analysis; comparative methods; quasi-experimental methods; probit; ordinary least squares and logistic regression analysis; small focus groups; historical, archival, and survey methods; ethnographic and auto-ethnographic work; and comparative analyses of policy traditions to probe, analyze, and understand the Internet in the context of everyday life. Society Online is designed for undergraduate and graduate students taking media studies courses in the areas of Communication, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Information Sciences, and American Studies.For more information about Society Online, please visit www.societyonline.net.

"These editors have the respect, visibility, and track-record to make this volume a contribution to the field of Internet studies. It will be adopted as an upper-division text and can also serve as a valuable reference work for doctoral students. Given its broad mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, this work should have wide appeal across the Social Sciences and Information Studies."
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach

"Society Online is an ambitious collection of articles, delivering the next generation of careful but eloquent studies of Internet use and culture. Both accessible and varied treatments, rich array of methodological approaches, intriguing data and provocative thought frameworks await the reader who would be curious to see if the internet context is already converging on some stability or still oscillating in search of its impacts and identity."

"This is perhaps one of the most rigorously researched collections about online interactions and culture. The essays, based on a major initiative by the Pew Foundation, integrate data from other projects, such as the General Social Survey... The book is atheoretical, engaging little of technology studies, whether social construction of technology, actor-network theory, or others."

CHOICE - J.L. Croissant